The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, an executive panel established by President Joe Biden to study judicial reform amid growing calls to reign in a conservative supermajority established via Republican party trickery, issued its final report this month. The text, clocking in at 279 pages, offers historical context along with arguments for and against certain reform measures (expanding the number of justices, stripping areas of jurisdiction) but stops short of calling for any systemic changes.

Those who felt the commission was a mere academic exercise, a Band-Aid on a constitutional bullet hole, felt largely vindicated. But as law professors Samuel Moyn and Ryan D. Doerfler write in the Atlantic:

If the commission was intended to be the place where Court reform went to die, its effect in the long term may be the opposite. With calls to change the Court still very much alive, ideas that were once fringe have now moved to the center of Court discourse. And with radical action by the Supreme Court continuing in the coming years — likely starting with the overruling of Roe v. Wade but not stopping there — we may look back on the commission as helping to set reform in motion, rather than stopping it in its tracks.